When I was a kid, I loved those Archie Comics digests, and one of my favorite series in those books was the original "Little Archie" stories by Bob Bolling. These weren't just funny stories, the illustrations were straight out of my storybook dreams, with its tales of kites, clubhouses and best friend Good 'Ol Gangs, adventures with funny aliens, rival gangs and magical mysteries!
Sadly, I wasn't really into the later Dexter Taylor stuff, and as time when on, I forgot all about how much i loved those early stories. But by chance when I was reading up on Dinosaurs, I happened to remember an old Little Archie strip I absolutely loved as a kid, where a friendly witch gives Little Archie the recipe to conjure up a live Pterodactyl into the Riverdale School Classroom!
It occurred to me that while I owned a TON of classic Archie/Jughead/PEP/Betty and Veronica comics, I didn't own even a SINGLE issue of Little Archie! Going onto ebay, I decided to rectify that right away. I didn't know which issues contained the stories I read as a kid in those early Digests, so i just bid at random. In the end, I picked up about 7 of them and waited for them to come in!
In the meantime I was browsing amazon and discovered that Archie Comics had released not one but TWO collections of Little Archie comics! Cursing myself for spending so much money on the original issues when I could have bought the collections for less than 10 bucks apiece, I ordered the two books right away and once again waited for my orders to come in.
In a few weeks, all the original comics from the 60's came in, and besides them being simply BEAUTIFUL to look at (or, as Bob Bolling would have Little Archie say, Boo'ful), I was delighted to find that no less than SIX stories I remembered from my childhood were in them, INCLUDING the Pterodactyl story! There were, of course, a lot more that wasn't in those issues, and I was crossing fingers they'd be in the trades that were on its way!
Finally my Archie Trade paperbacks came in, and I have to say, it's a good thing I bought those individual comics, because there wasn't a single story inside that I remembered!
Oh, the stories were decent enough (they focused a LOT on the Mad Doctor Doom stories, these I wasn't too interested in even as a kid) but they weren't the ones that I had any sentimental attachment to.
SO! Looks like it's BACK to the ebay auctions because I can now see that by Bolling's art style, all the stories I loved had to be between issue 1 and 22. So far, I've got issues #2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 and 22 so I'm about halfway there!
